Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

Digital Innovations in Oil and Gas with Geoffrey Cann

This is a weekly podcast of how #digital innovations will impact the global #oil and #gas sector, hosted by Geoffrey Cann, international author, professional speaker, and corporate trainer.

Episodes

October 15, 2025 22 mins

Oil and gas operations rely on heavy machinery and equipment that perform critical tasks, yet most of this equipment remains disconnected from the digital landscape of cloud computing, analytics, and autonomy. This lack of connectivity leaves operators with higher costs, inefficient maintenance, and limited visibility into how their assets are really performing.

The traditional approach to equipment design is no longer enough. Oper...

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Scheduling in oil and gas has long been a weak link. Wells, rigs, frack crews, contractors, and regulators must all line up in precise sequence, but too often the “system” is stitched together with Excel spreadsheets, siloed tools, and a lot of human memory. The result is inefficiencies, costly delays, and endless arguments in daily meetings.

That model is no longer good enough. The complexity of modern operations, coupled with vol...

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    October 1, 2025 33 mins

    The oil and gas industry generates extraordinary amounts of data from millions of sensors, yet only a tiny fraction, at most  8%, is actually used to inform decisions on complex and valuable assets. Decades of building analytics and machine learning solutions have helped, but they’ve also left companies with a patchwork of siloed systems and “industrial gridlock.”

    The arrival of foundation models in late...

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    Water is the unsung workhorse of the oil and gas industry. It's instrumental for generating steam, driving b, lubricating drill bits, flooding reservoirs, and separating oil from oil sands. Historically it’s been cheap, plentiful, and overlooked. As climate pressures mount and scarcity becomes real, water is now emerging as one of the industry’s most critical resources.

    Water isn’t just another utility, ...

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    September 17, 2025 34 mins

    The industrial sector faces a growing challenge: how to train a rapidly evolving, inexperienced workforce to safely and effectively operate aging and complex infrastructure. Traditional training tools like PowerPoint presentations and passive classroom learning

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    September 10, 2025 32 mins

    In energy and manufacturing, vast volumes of unstructured data (think OEM manuals, maintenance logs, shift notes, correspondence, procedures), sit largely untapped. For decades, experienced technicians have compensated by carrying critical knowledge i...

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    September 3, 2025 32 mins

    Why is a pug named Phoebe likely more qualified than your frontline crew? 

    In the oil and gas industry, online training and certification have become the norm. Let's agree it's convenient, cost-effective, and scalable. But what if the people taking that training are subverting the training using AI, or aren’t people at all?

    Digital tools, especially generative AI, ar...

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    The oil and gas industry has invested heavily in new digital technologies, but too many efforts fall short in value delivery. However compelling digital initiatives may seem, they will assuredly flounder if workers are unable or unwilling to adopt t...

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    August 20, 2025 27 mins
    The energy industry is having a moment. As assets become digitized, operations increasingly automated, molecules displaced for electrons, and capital more discerning, the biggest challenge is now people, instead of engineering. Specifically, where will the next generation of digitally fluent energy professionals come from?
     
    At the same time, academic institutions, whose mission is to deliver qualified ta...

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    August 13, 2025 33 mins

    Heavy industry runs on complex systems and distributed assets, but frontline workers are often still armed with paper manuals and radios. It works, but yields an unacceptably high level of inconsistencies, safety incidents, and productivity bottlenecks. And as experienced workers retire, critical knowledge about systems, assets, and good practice disappears.

    The shift to digital work execution is now both viable and urgent. Smartph...

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    July 23, 2025 29 mins

    The traditional model of hydrocarbon exploration has transitioned in much of North America, replaced by exploitation of known shale and tight resources. For shale players, exploration is seen as more risky, expensive, and slow than pursuing resource play. 

    Classic geochemical methods, reliant on sample collection and lab analysis, can’t keep up with the need for real-time decision-making. Helium—a light,...

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    July 16, 2025 28 mins

    In the world of oil and gas operations, edge devices are  mission-critical. These compact, intelligent sensors operate in  the most extreme of environments, such as remote drill sites, deep wells, and hostile landscapes, where they continuously collect operational data. Best in class operators don't just throw digital at th...

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    The global upstream oil and gas sector is confronting a mounting crisis—access to capital. For over a decade, international producers, especially small- and mid-cap firms, have faced shrinking pools of funding as banks exit the space and public equity markets falter. Traditional sources of capital have dwindled, leaving many promising ventures stranded without the financial fuel they need to grow.

    As cap...

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    June 18, 2025 30 mins

    In the upstream oil and gas sector, frontline operations have long depended on manual methods for information management, such as clipboards, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools. These outdated processes persist despite mounting pressure to improve efficiency and cut costs.

    But with today’s margin compression, regulatory scrutiny, and demographic changes, that operational model is no longer sustainable. Field operators are expecte...

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    June 11, 2025 32 mins

    Mid-sized oil and gas companies are now at a digital crossroads. While supermajors have pushed forward with large-scale transformation programs, many mid-market firms are only beginning to explore how digital innovation can improve performance. Their operational processes—budgeting, forecasting, asset planning—tend to mirror those of larger firms but constrained by fewer resources and less internal capability.

    Unfortunately, mid-s...

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    June 4, 2025 30 mins

    The oil and gas industry is sitting on a ticking environmental and financial liability. Around the world, millions of wells have been drilled to date, many more will be drilled, and all will eventually need to be plugged and abandoned. Today, the US alone has thousands of orphaned and marginal wells, many leaking methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. With underfunded asset retirement ob...

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    The oil market is once again bracing for change, with OPEC signaling their interest in unlocking supply that has been withheld. For producers, this looming oversupply translates into a fresh imperative: cut costs.

    The oil and gas sector, long accustomed to

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    May 28, 2025 33 mins
    For decades, hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—has relied heavily on water and sand to crack underground rock and release oil and gas. Fracking is safe, proven, and reliable, and in collaboration with horizontal drilling, has resulted in the huge growth in hydro carbon production in the US and Canada. 
     
    But fresh water is a scarce resource particularly in arid settings, and in many places under stress bec...

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    May 21, 2025 32 mins

    Despite covering over 70% of our planet, the oceans and seas remain largely unmapped and poorly understood. Collecting useable data about the oceans is hard and expensive--reliant on specialized costly vessels, old-school technologies, and plenty of labour.

    The comparison to land mapping technologies (like Google Earth) is stark--we have near-total visibility of land-based infrastructure, continuously up...

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    May 14, 2025 33 mins

    Natural gas producers have long struggled to differentiate their product in a market that treats gas as a commodity. When it comes to carbon intensity (CI), the industry is reliant on emission factors and self-reported data, and lacks a credible, data-driven approach to proving their gas carries a lower CI. 

    With new regulations like the Inflation Reduction Act’s Waste Emission Charge and Europe’s carbon...

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